All the Light We Cannot See: a novel

à la salade je suis malade au céleri je suis guéri
. . .
She takes his elbow, helps him to the davenport. He is still murmuring, trying to talk himself off
some innermost ledge, and she can feel fear pumping off him, virulent, toxic; it reminds her of
fumes billowing off the vats of formalin in the Department of Zoology.
Rain taps at the windowpanes. Etienne’s voice comes from a long way off. “All of them?”
“Not the radio in the attic. I did not mention it. Does Madame Manec know about it?”
“We have never spoken of it.”
“Is it hidden, Uncle? Could someone see it if the house were searched?”
“Who would search the house?”
A silence follows.
He says, “We could still turn it in. Say we overlooked it?”
“The deadline was yesterday at noon.”
“They might understand.”
“Uncle, do you really believe they will understand that you have overlooked a transmitter that
can reach England?”
More agitated breaths. The wheeling of the night on its silent trunnions. “Help me,” he says. He
finds an automobile jack in a third-floor room, and together they go up to the sixth floor and shut
the door of her grandfather’s room and kneel beside the massive wardrobe without risking the light
of a single candle. He slides the jack under the wardrobe and cranks up the left side. Under its feet
he slips folded rags; then he jacks up the other side and does the same. “Now, Marie-Laure, put
your hands here. And push.” With a thrill, she understands: they are going to park the wardrobe in
front of the little door leading to the attic.
“All your might, ready? One two three.”
The huge wardrobe slides an inch. The heavy mirrored doors knock lightly as it glides. She
feels as if they are pushing a house across ice.

---

“My father,” says Etienne, panting, “used to say Christ Himself could not have carried this
wardrobe up here. That they must have built the house around it. Another now, ready?”
They push, rest, push, rest. Eventually the wardrobe settles in front of the little door, and the
entrance to the attic is walled off. Etienne jacks up each foot again, pulls out the rags, and sinks to
the floor, breathing hard, and Marie-Laure sits beside him. Before dawn rolls across the city, they
are asleep.

---

Blackbirds
R
oll call. Breakfast. Phrenology, rifle training, drills. Black-haired Ernst leaves the school five
days after he is chosen as the weakest in Bastian’s exercise. Two others leave the following week.
Sixty becomes fifty-seven. Every evening Werner works in Dr. Hauptmann’s lab, alternately
plugging numbers into triangulation formulas or engineering: Hauptmann wants him to improve the
efficiency and power of a directional radio transceiver he is designing. It needs to be quickly
retuned to transmit on multiple frequencies, the little doctor says, and it needs to be able to
measure the angle of the transmissions it receives. Can Werner manage this?
He reconfigures nearly everything in the design. Some nights Hauptmann grows talkative,
explaining the role of a solenoid or resistor in great detail, even classifying a spider hanging from
a rafter, or enthusing about gatherings of scientists in Berlin, where practically every conversation,
he says, seems to unveil some new possibility. Relativity, quantum mechanics—on such nights he
seems happy enough talking about whatever Werner asks.
Yet the very next night, Hauptmann’s manner will be frighteningly closed; he invites no questions
and supervises Werner’s work in silence. That Dr. Hauptmann might have ties so far up—that the
telephone on his desk connects him with men a hundred miles away who could probably wag a
finger and send a dozen Messerschmitts streaming up from an airfield to strafe some city—
intoxicates Werner.